Meet Instructional Designer Brandon Winston [Audio Interview]

Instructional designer Brandon Winston joined the Microassist curriculum development team in May 2016. In roughly three minutes, Brandon gives insight on what an instructional designer does and why he’s so passionate about the process of developing custom training.

Interview transcript

VIVIAN CULLIPHER: Hi, I’m Vivian Cullipher with Microassist. I’m here with Brandon Winston, one of our newest employees, our newest staff members here at the company, and I just wanted to introduce him to you real quickly with a few quick questions so that you could get to know him a little bit. Brandon, how are you?

BRANDON WINSTON: Doing well. How are you doing this afternoon?

VIVIAN: Doing well, doing well. Glad to be talking with you. So let’s start with just a real basic question. Can you tell me what your title is?

BRANDON: I have been hired as an instructional designer here with Microassist.

VIVIAN: And what does an instructional designer do?

BRANDON: Depending on who you ask – you’ll get a lot of definitions. I personally like to think of myself as kind of a learning explorer. Customers approach us and they have some piece of knowledge that their students need to know. And what an instructional designer does is we get in there and start breaking it down, and figuring out, okay, where are all the pieces of this knowledge that they need to acquire? And assembling that into a package that is suitable for the students to consume and that makes sense where people can start to build their understanding of whatever the topic is.

VIVIAN: It sounds like you would probably cover a variety of topics in your career.

BRANDON: Absolutely, and I think that’s actually one of the best parts of being an instructional designer. I love learning. I love finding out new things. And I really enjoy the variety of clients and getting in there and going, okay, here’s this new, great topic — How can we get the students excited about it, and what’s new and different?

VIVIAN: And would you say that those are the attributes that directed you to become an instructional designer, or are there other interests that also played into that decision?

BRANDON: I would say yes, I kind of came at instructional design in a roundabout way. I started off in journalism, but at a previous company I was asked to take on the training team. And once I started working with training professionals and really digging into the training arena, it really started to click and make sense. So I decided to go back to school and get a master’s in education. And I’ve never looked back. It’s been awesome.

VIVIAN: Well, that’s fantastic. Well we’re certainly glad to have you here with us. So with that, I would like to know: What does your day-to-day job here at Microassist look like?

BRANDON: For the most part, I spend my time working with our clients, digging into their materials. They’ll approach us with a particular learning challenge or course request and I spend a lot of time digging into their materials, doing a lot of research, “chunking out” the knowledge into modules that make sense for the students and then designing storyboards so that our graphic artists can go in and produce the elearning, or, in the case of the current one that I’m working on, which is an instructor-led training, producing the slides and the instructor books that go along with it.

VIVIAN: Well, thank you so much, Brandon. We are very, very happy to have you on board and I know that our clients are going to be very pleased with all the work that you’re putting into their projects. Thanks for translating all the different subject matter into trainings that students can understand so that they can acquire that knowledge.

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As one of Central Texas’s most experienced software education centers, a primary training vendor for the State of Texas, and a Microsoft Certified Solution Partner, Microassist has successfully worked with clients in fields ranging from advertising, real estate, law and politics to state and government agencies.